Edward Herman replies to Christopher Hitchens

[Mark Pavlick]

>
>
>http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020128&s=letter#herman
>
>Penn Valley, Pa.
>
>Christopher Hitchens is "complacent" at my suggestion that he has
>moved to the "vital center, maybe further to the right, with
>termination point still to be determined" ("Minority Report," Dec.
>17). Actually, I understated the case. Nation readers may be unaware
>of the fact that on BBC2 Newsnight (September 27, 2001), Hitchens
>simply denied that 500,000 children had died in Iraq under the
>sanctions regime, and he claimed that all the deaths that have
>occurred in Iraq since the Gulf War were solely the fault of Saddam
>Hussein. In the rightwing journals that are increasingly fond of his
>writings--his work now surpasses Clinton in its "triangulations"--he
>now expresses pride that back in 1979 he didn't vote for the Labor
>Party candidate against Margaret Thatcher, whose "intellectual and
>moral courage" and "revolutionary" policies he now celebrates
>(Reason, Nov. 2001). He also supported her war against the Argentine
>fascists. Hitchens likes wars, against fascists, and it seems that
>anybody the United States or NATO-bloc powers take on are fascists.
>
>So Hitchens has actually sunk below the class we may call "liberals,"
>using the word in its best and traditional sense. As L. T. Hobhouse
>pointed out in his classic Liberalism (1911), "It is of the essence
>of liberalism, to oppose the use of force, the basis of all tyranny."
>He also spoke of the necessity of withstanding "the tyranny of
>armaments." Hitchens is enthused about the use of force- -one of his
>accolades to Bush's war is entitled "Ha ha ha to the pacifists"
>(Guardian, Nov. 14), and in another he argued that the "danger" was
>that Bush was not acting with sufficient violence (Guardian, Sept.
>26). And Hitchens hasn't shown the slightest concern over the fact
>that his war is encouraging militarization and is feeding back on
>civil liberties and domestic programs at home.
>
>Hitchens tells us now that Bush's war is doing wonderful things, not
>only for the cause of civilization but for Afghanistan as well-
>-bombing it "out of the stone age"--with "no serious loss of human
>life" and "an almost pedantic policy of avoiding 'collateral
>damage.'" But for some strange reason the US government has tried as
>hard as it can to limit information about collateral damage (see
>Carol Morello, "Tight Control Marks Coverage of Afghan War,"
>Washington Post, Dec. 7), and the war is still not over and the facts
>are hardly all in. Furthermore, there are extensive reports, mainly
>in the non-US media, of the bombing of villages and convoys with
>civilians, the use of fragmentation bombs, and many civilian
>casualties from US military operations. Mark Herold's careful study
>concluded that US bombs had killed at least 3,767 civilians in eight
>and a half weeks, which he explained as a result of the "apparent
>willingness of U.S. military strategists to fire missiles into, and
>drop bombs upon, heavily populated areas of Afghanistan."
>
>Herold's total exceeds the World Trade Center toll, which Hitchens
>clearly considers a "serious loss of human life." And the Herold
>number does not include the greatly increased rate of deaths from
>starvation resulting from the war (and deliberate Bush actions
>denying supplies), which has frightened all those working in food
>relief. Erwin van't Land, of Doctors Without Borders, stated in late
>November that "The situation deteriorated during the past two months
>of bombing, as large parts of the Afghan population dependent on
>international aid for survival [some 3.5 million people] did not
>receive it." And other news headlines read "First snow warns of
>humanitarian disaster: Relief aid hampered by weather, bandits, and
>infighting" (Guardian, Dec. 4).
>
>Erik Sorenson, the president of MSNBC, said recently about our
>knowledge of the war, "We'll find out in five or ten years what the
>real truth is." But Christopher Hitchens knows the truth now, just as
>he knows that the kind and gentle Bush administration is
>"pedantically" avoiding civilian casualties. Hitchens also knew back
>at the time of the Kosovo war that NATO--and his much beloved leader
>Bill Clinton--were driven to war by humane considerations, warring
>only "when the sheer exorbitance of the crimes in Kosovo became
>impossible to ignore" (Nation, June 14, 1999).
>
>There are also compelling reports from Afghanistan that our proxy
>allies on the ground are not only killing large numbers of prisoners,
>they are also raping and killing and looting on a horrendous scale
>(e.g., Paul Harris, "Warlords bring new terrors," The Observer, Dec.
>2, 2001). But for Hitchens any such matters like the "spotty human
>rights record of the Northern Alliance" are merely "the latest thing"
>that should not disturb our thanks at the liberation. "It remains" to
>reconstruct the battered country, he tells us, and Hitchens, with his
>faith in Bush and the NATO humanitarians does not doubt good things
>will happen. He seems unaware that Bush is already taking advantage
>of his new power position to cut back on civil outlays to his own
>non-elite citizens, which might suggest doubts about his willingness
>to aid poor and distant foreigners. Hitchens has also not paid much
>attention to actual post-US-intervention policy in Nicaragua, or
>Kosovo--in the latter case, where his war "has not solved any human
>problem, but only multiplied the existing problems" (according to
>Jiri Dienstbier, the UN rapporteur for human rights in Kosovo), and
>where his KLA friends were allowed to carry out "the largest ethnic
>cleansing in the Balkans [in percentage terms]," according to Jan
>Oberg, the director of the Swedish-based Transnational Foundation for
>Peace.
>
>Hitchens is also now playing the role of an enforcer, berating
>opponents of the war for not seeing this one as just, in a familiar
>pattern. He joins forces in this service with David Horowitz, who
>recently issued a lengthy smear of Noam Chomsky that he distributes
>at his talks at various schools ("Think Twice...Before You Bring The
>War Home," Campus Broadside Series). Hitchens has had at least half a
>dozen venomous attacks on Chomsky in the past two years, and much of
>his journalism and speaking engagements are devoted to this kind of
>derogation effort. The Guardian in London was recently forced to
>apologize to both playright Harold Pinter and journalist John Pilger
>for indefensible smears by Hitchens, and in his "Against
>Rationalization" (Nation, Oct. 8), he clearly delegitimizes any
>opposing viewpoint by making it a "rationalization" rather than a
>different position.
>
>His talk at the University of Chicago on November 27 explained that
>"Bush's war is our war," meaning the left's war. At this point in his
>political journey, we may have a long wait to find an imperialist war
>that Christopher Hitchens will not find to be a left's and just war.
>
>EDWARD S. HERMAN
>

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